Strength training is not
bodybuilding, where the primary consideration is the individual
muscle bellies and how to train them for appearance and aesthetics.
Strength training improves aesthetics and the size of muscle bellies,
but this happens as a side effect, not as the primary goal. The
purpose of strength training is the increase in the ability of the
whole body to produce force against an external resistance. This
requires the use of as much muscle mass as possible – since more
muscle mass produces more force than less muscle mass – operating
all the skeletal levers over the longest effective range of motion,
and quantitatively assessed by the amount of weight lifted.
The
tool that satisfies these criteria is the barbell, which allows for
incremental increases in weight over the entire spectrum of human
ability, from small increases at very light weights to 900-pound
deadlifts. No other equipment provides the flexibility to tailor
training loads to the individual trainee’s capacity – which is
absolutely necessary for long-term progress in strength. Because if
the loads cannot be adjusted to the trainee’s current capacity
and subsequent ability to adapt to heavier loads,
strength cannot be increased for any significant length of time.
Strength
training is a better use of time than anything else you can do in the
gym. Strength training improves your endurance, because if you are
stronger, every submaximal contraction, like running, or walking, or
working in the yard, uses less of your force production capacity and
is therefore less taxing. Strength training makes muscles grow
because that’s the way muscles get stronger, and more muscle mass
creates a healthier body. Since most interactions with your
environment are submaximal, strength training makes all interactions
with your environment more submaximal, and therefore more efficient.
And to top it off, a stronger person looks better than a weaker
person, since millions of years of evolution and cultural development
have programmed us to recognize this.
The key to the program is the
use of normal human movement patterns that can be incrementally
loaded. These are movements to which the human musculoskeletal system
has been adapted over the millions of years of evolution as a bipedal
animal. Horses can be trained for strength, but their movement
patterns are restricted to quadrupedal locomotion. Humans can produce
force in a variety of movements that can be incrementally loaded –
which leaves out running. Squatting down and standing back up,
picking something up off the floor, pushing something overhead,
pulling something toward you, pushing something away from you, and
throwing something up and catching it are the basic loaded movements.
Barbells
The
barbell exercises that correspond to these movements are the squat,
the deadlift, the press, the chinup and the barbell row, the bench
press, and the power clean and power snatch. They all have one thing
in common, as does the majority of human movement: they are performed
in a position of balance. We include the bench because of its
beneficial effect on the press and general upper-body strength, and
the chin because it ties together several aspects of upper-body
strength.
They
also have another thing in common: they work the muscle mass from the
proximal to the distal – from the center of the body to the
extremities, the feet and hands. This concept was first illustrated
by Bill Starr in his famous strength text The
Strongest Shall Survive,
with a graphic that illustrated a human body embedded in concentric
circles radiating out from the body’s center of mass.
Note that the size and mass of
the muscles decreases the further from the center of mass – which
is really counterintuitive to the way most people think about human
movement. The hands and the feet are typically the focus of an
athlete’s attention, and certainly the attention of most coaches. The
reality is that human movement starts in the large muscle mass around
the spine, and “radiates” toward the hands and feet. The feet
react against the ground, and the hands transmit the intermediately
generated force to the part of the environment you’re applying force
to.
We
run and throw with all the musculoskeletal components that start at
the spine and finally express motion at the hands and feet, while
controlling our position in space against gravity. The barbell
movements strengthen all the components of the kinetic chain that are
crucial to the movements, while requiring the control of the body
through unbalanced portions of the movement. The farther from the
center of the body a muscle group is, the less critical it is for
generating the force of the movement, the less affected the muscle
group is by the basic barbell exercise, while the more important it
may be for balance and coordinated motion. Calves and forearms are
both worked very hard in a deadlift, even though you may not be aware
of their contribution to the movement, but that doesn’t mean they
need special assistance exercises before your workout “feels”
complete.
The
fact that your entire workout consists of exercises that target
individual muscle groups means that you do not really understand how
the body functions in its physical environment, and how to better
prepare it to do so – if “function” is even the reason you’re
training.
This is the primary flaw in programs that target individual muscle
groups: muscle
groups
do not
function individually.
Quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and calves work together, at the same
time, and produce movement in the ankles, knees, and hips
simultaneously. The only way to isolate the quads is to use a machine
that generates a completely artificial movement pattern not found in
normal human activity. And since strength is displayed in normal
human movements, it cannot be effectively trained outside of those
movements.
Again,
we are not bodybuilders, and we do not care about the appearance of
individual muscle groups. Your appearance is largely determined by
your skeletal proportions, which are untrainable. I hate it as bad as
you do, but aesthetics and appearance are largely genetic. Buddy
Hackett would not have been a successful contest bodybuilder. But if
aesthetics are your primary concern, you will find that the best
improvements in your physique are the result of getting your squat,
bench press, deadlift, and press stronger, because those exercises
have the greatest impact on all
of your muscle mass, and therefore cause the majority of the possible
change in the appearance of your body.
The
Squat
The
squat is the most important barbell exercise for most people because
it has the longest range of motion under load, and incorporates a
stretch-reflex rebound at the bottom, the hardest part of the lift.
At sufficiently heavy weights, it profoundly affects all the muscle
mass in the body systemically, all at the same time, since nothing is
relaxed under a heavy squat. And the biggest muscles in the body –
the middle of Starr’s diagram – are the primary movers of the load
in the squat.
This is critically important:
systemic stress affecting the whole body produces profound changes in
the anabolic environment that are similar to the effects of anabolic
steroids. Isolation exercises cannot produce this effect, and that is
why small bodybuilders who only use bodypart-based programs are
essentially forced to use steroids if they want to get bigger and
stronger. In other words, heavy squats make your arms bigger than
dumbbell curls, even though they do not isolate the biceps.
The
Deadlift
An
impressive male physique is quite visible in clothes (purple bathing
suits are not necessary). The hallmarks are big traps, big forearms,
wide lats, deep hips, and thighs that fill the pant-legs. This is the
most direct result of a big deadlift, which actually makes more
difference in the appearance of your physique than even the squat.
Unless there is a serious problem with grip strength or weird
anthropometry, deadlifts are almost always trained with heavier
weight than the squat, because both novice and intermediate lifters
can pull more than they can squat for several years of training. I
have started women who could not squat their own unloaded bodyweight
below parallel, but could deadlift 135 on Day One.
Squats prepare the ground for
the deadlift, and vice versa. The deadlift is correctly performed by
thinking about pushing the floor with the feet – pushing the bar
away from the floor. The deadlift is a hip and knee extension from an
advantageous position of leverage, and this is what permits such
heavy weights to be trained. The traps, spinal erectors, hip
extensors, and the grip are all involved in a heavy deadlift, and at
limit weights there are no uncontracted muscles in the human body.
A
big deadlifter has big abs, obliques, and erectors. If he doesn’t,
he’s not a big deadlifter. This muscle mass is necessary to stabilize
the spine, and an unstable spine does not permit a big deadlift. If
you start with light weights as a novice and progress normally to
over 600, your waist size will have grown, because it has to. It’s
not fat – it’s very important muscle mass required for the lift. It
grows as the weight goes up. Don’t fight the process, and don’t think
that a bunch of situps will keep your “abs” “razor-sharp.”
Razor abs are for other men to look at, because women don’t care
about silly shit like this, which should give you pause.
The
Press
Presses
are hard, and that’s why most people won’t do them. They appear to be
an upper-body lift, and while its true that they are a shoulder
exercise, they are quite thoroughly beating the hell out of
everything between the floor and your hands. In fact, the press
benefits from the belt every bit as much as the squat and deadlift,
since spinal stability is absolutely necessary for force transfer
between the hips and the shoulders. If part of that kinetic chain
loosens, force transfer breaks down and the bar stops moving.
The abs are the main
stabilizers of the spine in the press, since the load is anterior to
the spine and the abs are the anterior muscle mass of the trunk
musculature. A belt is essential for heavy presses, while situps are
not just optional, but completely unnecessary and perhaps
counterproductive if they interfere with recovery. The function of
the abdominal muscle mass is to provide isometric tension against the
embedded spinal anatomy so that it doesn’t move under a load – and
thus lose its position during a force-transfer event, like a standing
barbell press. If you are squatting heavy, deadlifting heavy, and
pressing heavy, your abs are being worked, and situps are an
unnecessary vanity project.
The
traps are the main stabilizers of the bar overhead at lockout –
they may be considered the “hips” of the upper body in a press.
The traps originate from T12 to the base of the skull, and insert on
the scapulas. They support and protect the shoulders when any weight
is applied to them, from above or below. They are seldom regarded as
an important part of the press – and for that matter the jerk and
the snatch – but their contribution to a heavy press lockout had
best not be disregarded.
Bench
Press
If
you think of the bench press as a simple upper body exercise for the
pecs, you will never bench heavy weights. If you want to do sets of
10 with 185, go ahead, but heavy bench presses are braced between
your shoulders on the bench and your feet on the floor, with all the
muscle mass between this two points in hard isometric contraction.
The back is arched, the hips are in extension, the knees are
extending against the floor with feet planted and braced, and all
this muscle mass is in active contraction to control the position on
the surface of the bench. Yes, the shoulders and arms move the bar,
but at heavy weights the rest of the body is the foundation of this
movement.
For example, if your feet lose
contact with the floor during the rep, the bar comes back down – I
know this from experience. Even the bench press is a total-body
movement at heavy weights, using all the muscle mass between the
bench and the feet as a support structure. And it allows more weight
to be lifted than the press, thus strengthening the upper body more
effectively.
The
Rest
The
power clean and the power snatch are important parts of the program,
added after the previous exercises have been mastered. They are more
complicated movement patterns because they must be executed
explosively and correctly, and their range of motion is longer than
the other lifts, with more room for errors to occur. And they allow
you to practice holding a correct position while executing a complex
movement quickly. Barbell rows are useful for more advanced trainees,
for the reasons already discussed about the barbell exercises. They
do not
replace cleans and snatches, but they are useful when added to the
rest of the program. Chins are good for arms and lats, even though we
don’t really care about arms and lats as such. If you can’t do them
when you start training, get your deadlift up over 400 and an amazing
thing will happen. A man ought to be able to chin himself 10 times,
after all, and the fact that deadlifts drive this adaptation tells
you more about deadlifts than it does chins.
The
View From 50,000 Feet
Your
body is not a disparate collection of parts. It is an integrated
system that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and it
has adapted over that time to the environment it occupies – as has
every other animal on earth. No component of your body can be
considered in isolation from the other structures associated with it.
Strength training must be regarded as a process of increasing the
force production capacity of the body as it applies to the external
environment, which involves the
whole damn thing,
not just the “bis and tris” and the “quads.” The skeletal
levers are an integrated system of bones operated by muscles, all
working at the same time. It is not difficult to understand that if
their normal function is integrated, training them for the best
effect must be integrated as well, and that requires the loading of
basic human movement patterns. This is barbell training.
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